A chip off the old Downton block
It’s old-fashioned, a crowd-pleaser and got most of its stars from that TV series – so no wonder this potato pie drama is...
The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society
Cert: 12PG 2hr 4mins ★★★★★
Combine a quirky-sounding title with either the word ‘club’ or ‘society’ and a cynic might suggest that these days you’re pretty guaranteed a week or two at the top of the bestsellers list. I confess that slightly ungracious thought did occur to me as I watched The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society, an adaptation of the bestselling 2008 novel written by the late Mary Ann Shaffer and her niece, Annie Barrows.
There’s a clunkiness to the story, a familiarity with its component parts, that seems to be at least partially explained when you discover that it was the only novel that Shaffer – very much the driving force behind the project – ever wrote and that she was ill and over 70 by the time it was completed by Barrows.
Nevertheless, with another veteran at the helm – 76-year-old Mike Newell of Enchanted April and Four Weddings… fame – this unashamedly populist, crowdpleasing picture (the fact that two-thirds of the leading cast are former Downton Abbey stars says a lot) does get there in the end, despite the odd stumble along the way.
Devotees of the book will find that much has changed. Out goes the letter-writing structure that would instantly have smacked of 84 Charing Cross Road, while the threeman writing team has played fast and fairly loose with characters and plot details too. What results doesn’t always convince and, unfortunately, covers similar ground to last year’s Another Mother’s Son, but the longer it goes on, it demonstrates an old-fashioned appeal that should please those who like to complain: ‘Why don’t they make films like that any more?’ Well, here’s one they did.
The photogenic Lily James plays the first of several improbabilities in the film – our heroine Juliet Ashton, a young, beautiful writer and journalist who, in post-war London of 1946, is having a high old time promoting her latest smashhit book while being thoroughly wooed by a wealthy American GI, played with just the right amount of this-surely-isn’t-going-to-end-happily by Glen Powell.
But despite pressure from her handsome publisher (James’s fellow Downton alumnus Matthew Goode), she can’t quite find the subject for her next project. So when a letter suddenly arrives from a pig farmer in Guernsey (the second improbability is that the book he’s reading used to belong to her, has her address in it and he writes to her in the hope she might be able to find him something similar, as you do), she’s off to the Channel Islands in not quite less time than it takes for her lovestruck beau to propose. Which is awkward because, through the magic of flashback and editing, we already know things that Juliet does not. Such as the fact that her pig farmer – played by the Dutch actor Michiel Huisman – is tall, dark and handsome as heck and that the island, only beginning to recover from years of German occupation, is still nursing many dark secrets.
Oh, and we also know that, along with Tom Courtenay as the local postmaster, two more
Downton regulars are there – the wonderful Penelope Wilton, playing an understandably mournful matriarch, and Jessica Brown
‘It gets better and more powerful as it moves away from the whimsy towards the horrors of war’
Findlay, playing the headstrong Elizabeth. Brown Findlay’s presence – and absence – lies at the heart of the story that Juliet slowly begins to discover with both the help and hindrance of the members of the Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society.
The source material, of course, was written by an American, and I suspect that what ensues will come as much less of a surprise to audiences here than it does to American ones. Newell spares us detailed depictions of the many atrocities and cruelties perpetrated by the Nazis during the Occupation, but there’s no doubt the film gets better and more powerful as we move away from the whimsy of cute-sounding book-and-pie clubs and towards the dreadful horrors of war. That said, there’s surely something unsurprising about the very darkest secret Juliet uncovers as she digs deeper into the island’s recent history.
The simple structure of the story – Juliet keeps discovering new mysteries, only for them to be immediately resolved – does become a bit repetitive, and the extensive use of Devon and Cornwall does contribute to a rather disappointing sense of place. But James does as well as she can with her rather unlikely character, the supporting cast are solid and, as I say, it does get there in the end.
Turns out they do still make them like that, after all; albeit only occasionally.